The present invention relates to non-impact thermal printing, and more particularly concerns a print head having a large number of printing dots placed along a supporting substrate.
The technology of thermal printing offers a lowcost method of providing printed output, especially for applications where permanence is not required, such as in transaction recorders, screen copying for data-entry terminals, and calculators. In order to enhance the cost advantage of thermal printers, moving parts should be eliminated wherever possible. One approach to this goal is to construct a print head extending across the document and having a separate small heat-producing print element capable of creating a print dot for each position at which a dot-matrix character can be printed. The elements are energized in parallel as the document moves transversely to the fixed-position print head, thus printing an entire horizontal row of dots at a time for every character in a print line, rather than printing one character at a time across the line with a moving head.